My experiments with volcanoes

by Thomas Augustus Jaggar

W. C. Mendenhall, who had written a monograph on the volcano of Mount Wrangell in the great bend of the continent around the Gulf of Alaska, became director of the Geological Survey and one of my best friends.

In 1927 I was ready with cross-country cars and a seismograph to explore once more the volcanoes of Alaska. Organizing an expensive expedition which called for a special ship was obviously out, but in the years after the Technology Expedition of 1907 I had learned many economies which I wanted to try out. Also I had two experimental and mechanical tests to make. The first was to set up in Alaska a seismograph, the second was to test Alaskan beaches with a cross-country car, with a view to building an amphibian boat. I had read in several languages on the subject of motor vehicles with boat bodies, and my 1907 experience of finding no anchorage on Umnak Island had convinced me of the need for a vessel on wheels which could climb up an Alaskan beach and be converted into a camp. So I started from Seattle with a low gear Ford runabout. I unloaded it first in Kodiak village, where there were only one or two cars, and made tests of driving it along beaches.

At Kodiak the Agricultural Experiment Station allowed me to set up the seismograph in a vacant basement, and I arranged with a local housewife to operate the instrument. Aided by a sheet of instructions, she made tests, changed the smoked papers, varnished them, mailing them to Hawaii, and kept notes on earthquakes which were felt.

The roadster and I then traveled by the local mailboat steamer Starr, Captain Johanssen, and sailed along the south shore of the Alaskan Peninsula to King Cove, visiting Bradford on the way. Disembarking at King Cove, I made runs on the beach with the car. With the aid of the cannery mechanic, I tried attaching winch spools to drive wheels, in order to haul the car up to grassy land behind the beach. No car had ever landed at the cannery, there were no roads, and the problem of getting from the wharf to the tundra, and from the tundra to the beach and back again, posed practical mechanical problems, the solution of which was to be useful later. We ran along the beach as far as a rocky headland, until we needed an amphibian boat in which to round the point and rejoin the stony beach at some place beyond. How that boat body should be constructed was planned from this experience.

The superintendent, the physician, and the boatbuilders of the large King Cove cannery planned an exploration for me, with John Gardner as boatman and Peter Yatchmeneff as his mate. These two were on their way to hunt bears for an eastern museum and were going to Pavlof Volcano, the Vesuvius of the Alaskan Peninsula. I transferred my baggage to their motor sloop, the Plug Ugly, and we headed for Pavlof Bay.

At Volcano Bay we landed for a bear hunt, which was very exciting for me. When we found bear tracks in an amphitheater under big mountains, we climbed toward the divide at the head; but we could find no pass over it. From the high ground we looked across the river at clumps of alders. John borrowed my field glass, handed it back, and pointed out a black spot far away under the bushes. “I just saw it move,” he said, “that spot is a big brown bear where he has been holed up.”

I remained watching while John and Pete, with their 25-caliber Savage carbines, crept across the valley bottom, keeping down the wind from the bear in the shelter of bushes. I saw that they were getting very close to the game, lost sight of them for a few minutes, then heard two sharp cracks and saw the bear in violent motion, thrashing around and tearing up the ground, then quickly subsiding. I made my way across the valley and found they had neatly shot a year old Alaskan brown bear. The rest of the day was given to skinning it, and we sank the skull, tied to a fish line from the sloop, to the bottom of the bay where marine organisms would eat away remaining flesh and leave the bone clean.

Next we sailed up to the head of Pavlof Bay and camped at a barabara, or sod hut, preparatory to a trek to a small volcano that lies near a shallow lake on the north side of the magnificent pair of snowy volcano cones known as Pavlof and Pavlof Sister. We were early in the season and could see a glacier extending down from Pavlof Crater, which is a cup containing a conelet at the side of the summit. The crater is like a collar, the conelet like the knot of a necktie, while the glacier is the ribbon of the necktie, itself, extending down to a jumble of snowy hills with rocky moraines at the edge of the lake. We made camp and ran into some adverse weather, and also into a party of mainland sportsmen. We gave up further hunting and returned to King Cove, for John had his bear and that was enough. The curved beauty of the Pavlof cones, with a sweep of lava flows to the west of them, heavily mantled with snow, was exquisite and a knowledge of the cones was useful when plans were made for a later expedition.

Mrs. Jaggar, after a trip by way of the Yukon into the interior of Alaska waited for me at Kodiak while I took Captain Johanssen’s SS Starr to Unalaska where I saw my friends of the Coast Guard and received an invitation to go later on the Unalga to Attu. I stayed on the Starr to Bristol Bay on the Bering Sea side, in order to see the Alaskan Peninsula from the north.

A rewarding view showed me the almost inaccessible Aghileen Pinnacles, a marvelous mountain west of Pavlof, consisting of dozens of upright spires, all covered with ice, and looking like a cluster of cathedrals in a snow storm. At the head of Bristol Bay I saw one of the government Indian schools, met some of the teachers, and met trappers who came on board with interesting collections of fox furs. They told me about Naknek Lake, which gives access to Katmai from that side by dog sled in winter. The necessary husky dogs were tied out in the fields around a mission station.